Category Archive: Agile Development

A software development project split across separate tracks that multiple teams support is a great way to increase speed for delivering new features. Countless times in the past, however, I’ve seen release dates pushed back, preventing users from getting the features they need to perform their jobs. These delays have largely been the result of …

Dev Technology’s Research & Development team recently kicked off an internal development project to modernize our company’s sign-in book for guests. As a secure facility, it is important to track who comes and goes at both our Reston and DC offices. For years we used a simple paper ledger to track visitor names, when they …

So often when talking about agile development, especially in the Federal space, metrics such as velocity are considered important to determine how well a team is doing. However, I think the most important metric for an agile project is the time it takes to change code and deliver it to production. Companies like Netflix are …

By Day 5, we were getting close to wrapping up development and were focusing on improving the look and feel. Michelle and a few other interested parties who got involved had some excellent feedback on usability. Things like centering the title, having a model dialog pop-up instead of loading a new page, and pagination were …

We started Day 4 off with a demo of the prototype, similar to a Sprint Review session, and the general feeling was that we were making solid progress. We obtained some great user feedback and discussed how to modify our UI design to make DRIC more user friendly. Based on this, we made updates to …

Jesse came in Friday morning and was clearly enjoying our technology stack and working environment. We picked solid and appropriate technologies for the work we were doing and kept management overhead to a minimum. We were really just focusing on writing good code, testing, reviewing, and applying the feedback into the next round of development. …

To create the Drug Recall Information Center (DRIC), we decided to consume the OpenFDA drug recall data with another third party API to pull drug image data to put together a one-stop shop for drug recall information. We decided to build a RESTful service which will be consumed by our mobile-friendly UI. We used many modern …

Dev Technology was eagerly awaiting the request for proposal (RFP) of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) new blanket purchase agreement for agile development and delivery services. When it was released on June 17, we quickly got to work. What made this effort so exciting, was that instead of writing 20+ pages speaking to a technical and …

A previous project I worked on had nearly 1,000 pages of requirements documentation for a web-based system. This project was run using a typical Waterfall approach in which the requirements were gathered and a set of requirements documents were written, revised, and approved long before development began. Our team spent thousands of hours writing these …

An Agile team’s Scrum process is constantly shaped and guided by the individuals and their interactions on the team. By empowering the team to change the process instead of conforming to a predefined notion of how they should be working, the team’s morale will be higher because of their involvement. The quality of work will …